RUTHFULLY YOURS

This week in Paris, the executive board of Unesco, the United Nations entity charged with looking after matters related to education, science and culture, will vote on a resolution called “Occupied Palestine,” which attempts to redefine the capital of Israel as a supranational city to which Muslims, Christians and Jews have equal claim.

Perhaps not coincidentally, an exhibition currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City makes the same case. For the sake of Jerusalem, both need to be exposed as the attempts at historical revisionism that they are.

Jerusalem has been a busy patch of earth over the course of its history and a magnet for people of many faiths—first Jews, then Christians, then Muslims—becoming over the millennia a location of cultural fascination. The “Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven” exhibition at the Met is a case in point. The show highlights the spectacular objects produced in and around the medieval city that continue to inform its modern aesthetic. It is in many ways a curatorial tour de force and must have entailed all manner of diplomatic wrangling to garner so many loans of such delicate, irreplaceable objects.

But there is an elephant in this tastefully curated gallery. At its heart, this is a show about the identity of Jerusalem, as contentious a topic a thousand years ago as it is today, as is evidenced by the Unesco resolution. The exhibition’s premise, as is encapsulated in its title, is that during the medieval period, all claims to the city were equal and inhabitants were uniformly defined by their participation in this unique community.

This interpretation is implicitly projected onto the modern Jerusalem as photographs of the contemporary city appear on the gallery walls next to the explanatory texts. The visitor is encouraged to conclude that if only adherents of the three major religions—Christianity, Judaism and Islam—would understand themselves as citizens of Jerusalem, a city transcending national boundaries, this utopia could be recaptured. The organizers are careful to mix up the order of the three religions as listed in written materials to avoid the appearance of preferential treatment.

An uneasy subtext to “Every People Under Heaven” is that during the exhibition’s time frame Jerusalem was completely dominated by Christians and Muslims, successively. These four centuries spanned one of the sparsest Jewish presences in Jerusalem’s history, beginning as they did with the wholesale slaughter of Jews at the hands of the Crusaders in 1099, after which their population dwindled to as few as 200. The Mamluk conquest of 1260 marginally improved conditions, but a significant increase in the Jewish population would have to wait for the 18th century.

This reality is apparent in the show’s makeup, with Jewish objects being largely confined to books and jewelry, and Jewish issues to their longing for the “absent” Temple of Solomon, a longing that is treated as a somewhat quaint anachronism not as an expression of the enduring spiritual connection of Jews to Jerusalem. Jews, we are told, prayed outside the old city walls. Occasionally a Jew appears in the labels for the Christian or Islamic objects, as when one “Stella” reportedly declared that the Dome of the Rock and the al Aqsa mosque are “as radiant and pure as the very heavens,” as if to give the Jewish stamp of legitimization to the structures built on the Temple Mount.

Again, visitors may well ask themselves from this evidence, why can’t we all just get along today as well as we seem to have done in 1000-1400?

US President Barack Obama’s eulogy of Shimon Peres at Mount Herzl last Friday was a thinly disguised assault on Israel. And he barely bothered to hide it.
Throughout his remarks, Obama wielded Peres’s record like a baseball bat. He used it to club the Israeli public and its elected leaders over and over again.
Peres, Obama intimated, was a prophet. But the suspicious, tribal people of Israel were too stiff necked to follow him.

In what was perhaps the low point of a low performance, Obama used Peres’s words to slander his domestic critics as racist oppressors.

“Shimon,” he began harmlessly enough, “believed that Israel’s exceptionalism was rooted not only in fidelity to the Jewish people, but to the moral and ethical vision, the precepts of his Jewish faith.”

You could say that about every Israeli leader since the dawn of modern Zionism.

But then Obama went for the jugular.

In a startling non sequitur he continued, “‘The Jewish people weren’t born to rule another people,’ he [Peres] would say. ‘From the very first day we were against slaves and masters.’” We don’t know the context in which Peres made that statement. But what is clear enough is that Obama used his words to accuse the majority of Israelis who do not share Peres’s vision for peace – including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu who was sitting in the front row listening to him – of supporting slavery.

The unprecedented outcry over Abbas’s participation in the funeral of an Israeli leader is further proof of the degree to which Palestinians have been radicalized.

This is what happens when you unleash a tidal wave of hate against Israel and its leaders in the media, mosques and public rhetoric. In light of this brainwashing, how do you expect your people to respond when you, in any way, associate with an Israeli leader?

If attending the funeral of an Israeli leader, especially one who devoted the past two decades of his life to peace between Israel and the Palestinians, draws such condemnation, it is easy to imagine the result of a Palestinian leader making a peace overture to Israel.

Even if the current condemnation eventually dies down, it will have sent a message to future Palestinian leaders: “No peace with Israel, not in our time, and not in any time.”

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas is facing a barrage of criticism for attending the funeral of former Israeli President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem. The fury directed towards Abbas comes as no surprise to those who are familiar with the unrelenting campaign of anti-Israel incitement that has been taking place for many years in Palestinian society.

If attending the funeral of an Israeli leader, especially one who devoted the past two decades of his life to peace between Israel and the Palestinians, draws such condemnation, it is easy to imagine the result of a Palestinian leader making a peace overture to Israel.

President Abbas is now receiving a dose of his own medicine. This is what happens when you unleash a tidal wave of hate against Israel and its leaders in the media, mosques and public rhetoric. This is what happens when you inform your people that Israeli leaders are “war criminals” who ought to be prosecuted before the International Criminal Court. This is what happens when you drive into your people that Jews are desecrating with their “filthy feet” Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem. This is what happens when you accuse Israel of “ethnic cleansing”, “extra-judicial executions” and “poisoning” Yasser Arafat.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri would like the Europeans to understand that they need not worry about terrorism by the Islamist movement because the attacks will be directed only against Israel.

The European Court of Justice (EJC) is sending the message to Hamas that Europeans see no problem with Hamas’s desire to destroy Israel and continue to launch terrorist attacks against Jews. This message also undermines those Palestinians who still believe in a peace with Israel.

The EJC recommendation to remove Hamas from the EU’s terrorism blacklist comes at a time when countries such as Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and even Saudi Arabia, as well as the Palestinian Authority, are doing their utmost to weaken Hamas.

Appeasing terrorists is a dangerous game: it has already backfired on its foolhardy players and will continue to do so. This is exactly how Muslims conquered Iran, Turkey, North Africa and much of Europe, including Hungary, Greece, Poland, Romania, and the Balkans — countries that still recall a real “occupation,” an Islamist one, and abundantly want none of it.

The EU and the ECJ need to be stopped before they do any more harm to Palestinians, Christians and Jews — or to Europe.

Once again, the Europeans seem to be in Alice’s Wonderland when they consider Palestinian affairs in particular and the Middle East in general. The renewed attempt by the European Union to remove the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas from its terrorism list is a case in point.

Recently, an advisor to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) recommended that Hamas be removed from the EU’s terrorism blacklist. In 2014, the EU’s second-highest court ruled that Hamas should be taken off the list on “technical” grounds. It argued that Hamas’s listing was not based on evidence, but on “factual imputations derived from the press and the internet.”

However, the European Council then appealed this judgement, arguing that Hamas should remain on the terrorism blacklist, citing a 2001 decision by the UK and the US that designated both Hamas and the Tamil Tigers as terrorist groups. But the recent opinion by the ECJ advisor dismisses this argument. “The council cannot rely on facts and evidence found in press articles and information from the internet,” Advocate General Eleanor Sharpton said. She explained that the council could not rely on terrorist listings by countries (the UK and US) outside the EU.

This latest highly dangerous European attempt to strike Hamas from the terrorism blacklist will, as the EU knows perfectly well, only serve further to embolden the Islamist movement to replace Israel with an Islamic empire.

TEL AVIV—Israel on Wednesday defended plans to build 98 new housing units in the occupied West Bank, after the U.S. issued an unusually harsh rebuke of the proposed construction.

Israel’s government intends to use the new units to rehouse Jewish Israelis from a West Bank settlement the country’s high court has deemed illegal and ordered evacuated, Israel’s foreign ministry said in a statement. The new housing will be built within the existing settlement of Shilo in the northern West Bank and won’t constitute a new settlement, it said.

“Israel remains committed to a solution of two states for two peoples, in which a demilitarized Palestinian state recognizes the Jewish state of Israel,” the statement added.

The announcement of the new units comes amid increasing U.S. frustration with Israel’s expanding settlement enterprise and after the White House agreed to a major military aid package for its Middle East ally.

The Obama administration last month said it would provide Israel with $3.8 billion a year in military aid over a decade, a 23% increase over current levels.

The State Department on Wednesday said it was “deeply troubling” that Israel had decided to jeopardize its security by continuing to build settlements and making a two-state solution for peace between Israelis and Palestinians a dim prospect.

Israel’s high court in 2014 ordered that Amona, an illegal settlement outpost that is home to some 40 families, should be evacuated as it was built on Palestinian land.

The Israeli government has been discussing how to rehouse those settlers, finalizing a plan to move them to Shilo, according to Wednesday’s statement from the foreign ministry.

The new units were first highlighted by monitoring group Peace Now on Saturday, a day after President Barack Obama flew to Jerusalem to attend the funeral of Shimon Peres , the towering Israeli statesman who helped craft the vision of a two-state solution. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Palestinian Authority not only celebrates murderers: it produces new ones every day — and does so knowlingly and voluntarily. For this it uses textbooks, television and radio programs, and articles in newspapers, all paid for with money from Western governments.

The Palestinian Authority also financially rewards the murderers’ families and the murderers themselves. These financial rewards are also paid for with money from Western governments.

How can Western politicians explain that they condemn the murders and still fund the incitement to kill? How come they keep giving money that rewards murdering Jews “by all available means”?

How can they define as “moderate” an organization such as the Palestinian Authority that admits sending terrorists to kill Israelis and that teaches children, on its Facebook page, how to stab Jews to death? And how can they consider it urgent to give such an organization its own State?

Israeli Jews know they can only rely on themselves. They know that others, such as France, are holding knives that are sharpened.

The sport of murdering Jews does not stop. On June 30, at dawn, in Kiryat Arba, a young Arab broke through a window, and stabbed a 13-year-old American-Israeli girl, Hallel Yaffa Ariel, to death.

The young Arab who stabbed Hallel Yaffa Ariel was shot dead just after the assault. His mother said she was proud of her son. The Palestinian Authority (PA) said he was a hero and a “martyr.”

This year alone, 24 Israeli Jews were murdered, many gruesomely. Every time one of the murderers was shot, his family declared how proud they were, and the Palestinian Authority celebrated him. New murderers are preparing new attacks.

What sort of society is it where parents say they how proud they are that their children are murderers? And what sort of leadership is it that celebrates killers?

Further, what sort of Western journalists and “human rights” groups are those that fail to voice their outrage at the murder of a sleeping 13-year-old girl?

These journalists and human rights groups voice their outrage at people killed in European soccer stadiums, musical theaters and editorial rooms, but never, it seems, for Israeli Jews killed over so many years.

Why also is it that they never speak of the moral depravity of the Palestinian Authority?